Ever since Kevin Warwick implanted a chip in his arm in 1998 (the main use of which seemed to be to turn lights on and off in rooms he entered – or at least that’s the bit I remember), RFID chips have been spreading far and wide.

Our most prominent use in the UK has probably been the “biometric” chips in our passports, which yesterday The Times reported as being really very easy to clone.  No suprise there then. 

But a bit concerning if you think of some of the uses suggested for RFID – the most interesting (in terms of learning about people and behaviour) is implanting them, Kevin-Warwick style, under your skin.   A company called Verichip specialises in this, and has implanted them in a Mythbuster, and in this US policeman, who claims his life was saved by the medical data stored on the chip.

Aside from a couple of scare stories linking the chips to heightened cancer risk, the key weakness is the ability to clone and hack them.  Of course, this will probably never be fully solved, and that does mean that if you connect the chip to your credit card details, medical history (although see above) or other area, it could get risky. 

But some benefits are clear

- Medical chipping to identify and feed medical records of a patient quickly, especially at the scene of an accident, etc.

- Ease of entry: the chips are already in use at one night club in Spain.  Taking the chip out of your Oyster card and implanting it in your hand would also mean no more forgetting or fumbling for your card holder on the underground in London.

- Tracking: the benefits of knowing where you are start with some typical applications like tracking the whereabouts of prisoners, or kids for their safety, and of course all objects and animals for identification and delivery and so on.  Furthermore, Kevin Warwick’s light switching can be extended to everything around the home of office – lighting, heating, turing your hifi on and off, logging you into to your home PC and so on.  More interstingly, your current location (or at least your location when checked by an RFID scanner) can open up new data streams that you can use to your advantage (or other can misuse to theirs, if so allowed).

Still, I don’t think I’m ready to be chipped quite yet, and if I am, maybe a GPS receiver/transmitter would be better.  If more uncomfortable.

The explosion of services in and around real-time behaviour broadcasting (which I’m going to call RTBB, mostly because I can – I think they are properly called “presence streams” or “lifecasting”) is one of the Big stories of the last 12-18 months.  It’s fuelled by the innate desire of humans (the kind of thing I refer to a lot) for two things:

1. Connectedness - feeling a connection to other human beings, being aware of what other people are up to, and them being aware of you.  The outcome of this is (supposedly) greater connectedness.  Ironically the noise levels, and the sharing of information with people you actually don’t know that well, probably often has the opposite effect.
2. Cool new toys – much of this technology just has the “wow, that’s pretty cool” gut reaction from its users.  Because of that, loyalty can be very low and use is often very short-term.

Taken together, this appetite for new models of, and tools for RTBB will mean a lot of new services will be keep being launched for the foreseeable future.  Darwinian evolution will mean the fittest (probably a combination of the best ideas combined with the ability to grow, develop and monetise) will last – or services that sit as aggregators will end up catching the majority of the traffic.

When I remember to twitter/tweet (whatever the verb is) I’ll do it.  But I have to remember first, and then describe what it is I’m doing, and probably filter it myself for its interest-level…. I know, that’s probably not even in the spirit of it!  So, what might be needed is a “presence stream” tool that posts updates without heavy user intervention.

The noise, in any case, will continue to grow, and that will mean we need better ways of filtering out the interesting and relevant items.